Carroll Shelby

Never count this Texan chicken farmer out

Feature Article from Hemmings Muscle Machines

At best, I never got beyond being a so-so mechanic," Carroll Shelby related in his 1965 book, The Cobra Story. "Don't imagine that I was or ever became a clever mechanic who, when he can't find what he wants in a parts store, goes back to his shop and makes it on a lathe. I haven't the patience to fool around for hours, measuring this and checking that."

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Indeed, there were many things Shelby wasn't great at: He never pursued education beyond high school, he wrecked his first motorcycle, and he went bankrupt as a chicken farmer. However, it was that last experience that led him into auto racing, and from there into automotive fame.
Born in January 1923 in Leesburg, Texas, Shelby often took in the dirt-track races near Dallas, then graduated to hot-rodding Model Ts, Model As and a Willys Overland, according to Wallace Wyss's book, Shelby: The Man. The Cars. The Legend. It wasn't until 1952, after a stint in the Army Air Corps during World War II, marrying his first wife and trying out a few different business ventures, that Shelby took the wheel of a car for his first race. Driving a stock MG-TC for Ed Wilkins at a sports-car race in Caddo Mills, Texas, Shelby walked away from the field.
"He won, but not because of his driving finesse," Wyss wrote. "It was because Shelby didn't play by gentlemen's rules. He came to the sport with a different philosophy... Shelby, right from the beginning, cut the dandies off on the inside of the curves, determined to win, even if it meant shoving them off into the hay bales. He didn't care if he bent metal; the point was to win, right?"
Throughout the 1950s, he put that philosophy to work, moving from amateur to professional driver for Aston-Martin, Allard, Maserati and Donald Healey. Sports Illustrated named Shelby driver of the year in 1956 and 1957, and from 1958 to 1959 he drove Maseratis and Aston-Martins in World Championship Formula One racing.
In 1960, a year after winning the 24 Hours of Le Mans, Shelby gave up racing due to angina pectoris, a recurrence of the heart problems that he'd had in childhood. By then, he'd already opened up a sports car dealership in Dallas, started a side career as a pitchman for Brylcreem and Jantzen, and had fostered dreams of building his own sports cars. That same year, he started CS Engineering to do just that.
Even with this venture, Shelby had a couple false starts, trying to re-body Corvettes with Scaglietti coachwork and slipping small-block Chevrolet V-8s into Austin-Healeys. But then in 1961, Shelby made contact with A.C. Cars in England and Ford Motor Company in Detroit, and decided to marry Ford's upcoming thin-wall casting small-block V-8 with A.C.'s tube-framed, aluminum-bodied Bristol sports car. The first such car, eventually named the Cobra, went together in Dean Moon's shop in Santa Fe Springs, California.
Shelby soon became Ford's ultimate race weapon, squaring off against the Corvette with the G.T. 350 and G.T. 500, and against Ferrari with the Daytona Coupe and GT40. Yet Shelby's poor showing in Trans-Am later in the decade led to a less-than-amicable split between Shelby and Ford in 1970. Shelby attempted a few racing experiments shortly afterward, including entering a turbine car at Indy, but pulled out of racing for the rest of the 1970s and retired to ranching in Texas.
He'd made far too many friends and associates in the car business to leave it behind entirely, however. Lee Iacocca (see Hot Rod Hero, HMM#82, July 2010), with whom Shelby had worked while putting together the Shelby Mustang program, had moved to Chrysler, and in the early 1980s he asked Shelby to once again lend his name and his expertise to several front-wheel-drive Dodges, including the Omni, Daytona, Shadow and Spirit.
Though, as Wyss noted, the Shelby Dodge program moved more metal than the Shelby Mustang program, it also led to tension between the Shelby and Dodge camps over which would get the primo parts. Iacocca canceled the program, but kept Shelby on to help with the Dodge Viper, itself a tribute to Shelby's own Cobra.
As successful as Shelby was in improving other companies' cars, the clean-sheet Shelby Series 1, powered by an Oldsmobile Aurora V-8, hardly entered production, according to Wyss, and even then encountered difficulties, with less than half of the projected production run selling.
Shelby, however, bounced back. With Ford's re-commitment to performance vehicles in the early 2000s, Ford renewed its relationship with Shelby and once again began affixing Shelby's name to a series of high-performance Mustangs that continues to lead Ford's pony-car line today.

This article originally appeared in the October, 2010 issue of Hemmings Muscle Machines.